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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ l o c a t e d
I D : : D r e a m s
T Y P E: : R E C O L L E C T I V E
Dreams are weird. Everyone I met seems to have had a really varied experience with them: Most of the friends I've had have for the most part seemed not to remember theirs, and when they do, they're usually just bad dreams or nightmares. Very very rarely have I ever heard them recount particularly interesting dreams; maybe once a year for each one of them.
For me, though, dreaming has always played a pretty big part in my life. I don't remember when I first started to, well, remember my dreams (lol), but I know it was some time around when I was in primary school, before my parents had made the decision to take me out of school. I know that because the oldest dream I can remember involves getting chased up a tree in the playground of that school by a nest of Terran scorpions, and then falling off and getting stung all over until I woke up.
That dream is pretty typical of the ones I've had ever since then. Until I was about 20, the vast, vast majority of my dreams featured me getting killed or injured in some gruesome and painful manner; usually by drowning, falling off a building, getting stabbed; choking was particularly common too- though that was usually reserved for dreams about my father. A lot of the times, I woke up just as something bad was about to happen: I had the luxury of being able to wake up before then a lot as a kid. But as I entered into my teenage years, that stopped happening as frequently. A lot of the time it'd end up being the pain of something like getting stabbed that woke me up. I'm not sure if this is the norm for other people, but for me, it hurt
a lot.
Something that I find interesting is that in dreams, there isn't the same degree of suffering to it as there is with pain in wakefulness? Like sure, it hurts like hell, but usually I'm actually more shaken by the contents of a dream when I wake up than while I'm in it. I don't know anything about the way dreams work on a neurological level, but part of me wonders if whatever portion of the brain is responsible for self awareness is turned off while you're asleep; it'd certainly explain why you tend to go along with anything that happens in dreams and don't really question the wack-ass internal logic they often have.
But, yeah. I couldn't even guess at the amount of times I've been impaled or devoured or decapitated or just plain old jumpscared to death in my dreams. If I had to guess it'd probably be firmly within the hundreds. When I was younger, it happened to me I think pretty much once a week; maybe a bit more rarely than that. The other thing that puzzles me is, I don't really know what causes it: My first guess would be trauma/generally being a disturbed kid, butI know other people who have had
way worse circumstances than me, and they've not had anywhere near as many violent dreams or nightmares. Mine started at such a young age, too - before all of the really awful stuff happened to me - so I'm not sure at all what's up with that.
It's been at its worst this year, actually. I've started having dreams of late that don't even end when I am killed. I get stabbed or shot and it hurts, but I don't die and the dream just keeps on going. Things that used to wake me up, like falling or trying to count my own fingers, don't work either. I'm not sure how that's even possible, but it's lead to some very, very unpleasant scenarios. It got so bad this year that there were a few days last month where I could remember being afraid of going to sleep at night, because I knew I was going to get tortured in my dreams again.
this got kind of depressing lmao I wasn't planning on this entry going this way
My dream situation isn't
quite as bad as I'm making it out to be: there is actually another side to this. For all that I've had and continued to have frequent murder dreams, I've also always had a lot of really fantastic dreams. There've been a lot of times where I would go on adventures and do, I dunno- exciting fantasy shit, like fight bosses from video games or explore cool ancient ruins. There's one dream I had like a decade ago of the latter that's stuck with me to this day: It started off by walking up to this little cave on the coast that got covered when the tide came in, and going into this underground, kinda like swimming pool place? The floors and ceiling were all made of plastic, but everywhere was dripping little bits of water, and there was a layer of water about half a foot deep on the ground everywhere. I don't know why, but I find places with water covering the ground
incredibly comfortable to be in; it's been one of my favourite 'area aesthetics' in games for as long as I can remember.
I don't tend to get cool dreams like that as much at the moment, but I did have one just the other night. I was in a party with a bunch of other people- we were playing an
Ormurr & Cullers-inspired game, but in real life somehow- and we were trying to do... I don't remember exactly what, but the first bit I can recall is it involved trying to carry a metric fucktonne of shiny rocks back to my house; which was fun because shiny rocks. I kept dropping them and spilling them all over the floor, which wasn't great- but later on the dream got to an actual combat part and I got to run around doing a bunch of fromsoft game-esque parkour and dodging attacks and stuff. This sounds so much less interesting than it actually was because I can't remember any of the fucking details lmao, but I promise it was good. Anyway towards the end of that one, the party came together to try and design our own classes, and I said I was gonna have a crack at making a
Rukhmar class for myself! I got to think about being a giant bird and running around eating people and being all on fire and stuff, awawawawawawa that was suuuuuper gender I loved that.
That's right, actually; some of the best examples from recent years would be dreams in which I got to be Rukhmar. It's so amazing getting to be a bird for a little while and move around the way I
should be able to; it always feels so euphoric at the time, and it always leaves me in a good mood after I wake up.
Come to think of it, dreams have always been my primary source of species euphoria. When I was much much younger and still thought of myself as
wyrmkin rather than a bird, there were a handful of dreams I think where I got to be a dragon. Those were always incredible... I can remember the feeling, and I never felt better than I did with scales and a tail. It's been a very long time since I had one of those dreams; they stopped around the time that that qualia got passed to
Straessa I think, and she rarely tended to think of herself as an actual dragon, so I don't recall her ever appearing that way in one of her own dreams.
Ah, that's another thing. Every now and then, back when she was still around, I'd have a dream where both me and Straessa were present there. ...There are no words to describe quite how amazing it feels to be able to actually stand side-to-side with one of your headmates. It's something that will never be possible in real life, so to get to experience it even in a dream is something I could only describe as magical. Every time I woke up after seeing her, I was always thrilled to bits. The parts of dreams where we were together were always short, but they were my absolute favourite thing to dream about, and they always made me so happy.
...I miss those times.
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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ t e r m i n a t e d
